


felt it ripping me apart

by strawberryss



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Panic, Vampire Turning, a bit of an identity crisis, adam delivers a pep talk sort of, dissonance between the Self and the Reflection, kira turns and it goes poorly for her
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29948214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawberryss/pseuds/strawberryss
Summary: following a mission gone wrong- exploration of the post-turning process
Relationships: Female Detective/Nathaniel "Nate" Sewell
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	felt it ripping me apart

Kira wakes from a nebulous, pained darkness to the memory of a familiar voice- beloved, broken- calling her name. At first, she wonders if she’s hungover; the lights are dimmed but too bright, and she feels sick with a hollow emptiness that tangles her stomach into knots. She sits up with a groan, and scrubs at her face with her hands until flashes of recollection start to surface from the depths of her foggy mind. They are more sensation than anything else, brief impressions of moments in time. Blood. _Please_. Pain. _I’m sorry_. Cold. _Stay with me_. Blood… no, she is decidedly not hungover. She had woken up before, she recalls, feeling stiff and strange all over, and upon trying to stand up had been overcome with a tidal wave of nauseated exhaustion so strong she’d had to sit hunched on the edge of the bed holding her swimming head between her knees until she’d stopped feeling like she might pass out.

Her second attempt had not been much more successful, and she had resigned herself to laying back and irritably shoving at the scratchy sheets until someone came to explain why she was once again in the Agency’s medical wing. She had remained entirely silent while Elidor gently explained what had happened, pushing aside complicated swirls of emotion and focusing only on the concrete facts, of which there were three. In order, she’s been going through them again and again, turning them over in her mind like puzzle pieces which don’t quite fit into the rest of the picture.

One- she had been mortally wounded.

  
Two- they’d turned her; there had been no other option to save her life. Which means that:

  
Three: she is not going to die. Not now, perhaps not ever.

  
It’s a short list, but she repeats it religiously- one, two three, one, two three- because otherwise, her mind will start wandering. The trek from these simple isolated truths to their messier implications is a short one she can’t stand to make. Will she have to leave Wayhaven? It had been in her plans, eventually, but there’s a difference between moving and having to slowly disentangle yourself entirely from human society as an unforgivable amount of time passes you by untouched.  
More pressing, how will she leave this hospital room? Because beyond this controlled environment, with its drawn shades and soundproofed walls, is a noisy, chaotic world that had already at times overwhelmed her until she couldn’t breathe.

  
And there is one more concern; she has pointedly not allowed her train of thought to drift in that particular direction, but the seed of fearful doubt is rapidly taking root in the back of her mind anyway, snarling around her spine and curling purposefully at her throat. After all, it is one terrifying thing to love someone knowing that your lives run on different tracks, that you must fit the vast expanses of your devotion into the span of 60 or so years. To promise your eternity to another person is another animal altogether, and she cannot ask Nate to give her that- it is a gift she doesn’t deserve, and why would he want to offer it anyway? She knows how much he misses humanity, seeks out the echoes of it wherever he can- without hers, will he recognize her, or just see the chasm where that mortal part of her used to be?  
It doesn’t bear thinking about for long, the inevitable, and so she pulls her focus back to the safety of the past, the proven. She’s managed to delay whatever is going to come next so far, having asked Elidor for some time alone to rest. It had been a flimsy excuse, but he had kindly pretended to believe it and let her be, staring blankly at the wall and mentally reciting the concise points that comprised her list until sleep had claimed her.

  
Perhaps it had helped after all; she still feels hollowed out and numb, but the sickly dizziness is gone and the lights above her no longer leave sharp, star-like patterns in the backs of her eyes. The signs are promising enough that she decides to try standing again, shoving the blankets off and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. This time, she does manage it, though she immediately stumbles upon making contact with the ground as a strange, shaky sensation skitters up her calves, pins and needles pressing against the soles of her feet and making her wobble like a newborn foal. She grabs at the pole where an IV bag would usually be hanging for support, wincing at the bright spark of unexpected chill where her hands make contact.

  
 _Did this get shorter?_ she thinks distantly, and then remembers that the pole isn’t shorter, she’s just taller now, and she wonders if that means she’ll have to buy new clothes. Which is just so stupid, so ridiculously not important a detail in the grand scheme of things, the fact that her mind jumped there first makes a laugh just left of hysterical fizzle in her throat, and it is so profoundly unlike her that it makes her feel sick. She stumbles to the adjoined washroom as she feels her chest constrict painfully in feverish panic, dragging the IV pole behind her half for balance and half for comfort, and leans over the sink, gasping for breath, until her heart stops beating against her ribs like a caged animal and she can inhale without the air stabbing knife-like at her lungs.

  
Slowly but surely, her breathing evens out, and she glances up at her reflection in the mirror- then freezes.

  
The differences are slight, so much so that at first she thinks it must be a trick of the light, but the more she casts her gaze over the face reflected back at her, the more she is sure it cannot be hers. Or, more accurately, it is hers in the way that an old picture is one’s self- similar enough to recognize but changed enough to be almost another person entirely.

  
It looks as though she has never lived in this body, never tested its limits by climbing that one unsteady tree branch and knocking a deep, jagged scar into her forehead for her trouble. Never pierced her own ears with a needle and ice cube in a misguided attempt at rebellion. Never stayed up through the night and marked the sleepless hours by the dark circles under her eyes. She grips the sink as she searches for familiarity in the reflection before her; the porcelain crumbles like sand beneath her shaking fingers, and this too is hideously unrecognizable, the strength and the unintentional destruction it can bring, the need to exist cautiously.

  
The more she looks, the more untethered from herself she feels, unmade and reformed by an architect with little regard for detail, the outline and not the shape itself. And she supposes she has been, in a way- she remembers, if nothing else, the searing agony as her bones had separated and knit themselves back together. It shouldn’t be real, it shouldn’t be possible for these traces of her life, the storms she has weathered and the consequences of her recklessness, to be wiped from her body as if they had never existed. A map unmade. A history forgotten. Even the scar she’d gotten from Murphy is vanished, a feat not accomplished even by the Agency’s healing magic. And for some reason it is this, the absence of a scar she never wanted, that finally breaks her as she sinks to the floor with a dark dismay rising in her throat like bile.  
\---  
The linoleum floor is cold against her shins, but she welcomes the bracing shock it gives her, focuses intently on the sensation of it pressing on her legs as another swell of dread threatens to drown her. Her hands find each other, twisting anxiously until she realizes she does not recognize them either; the familiar divots of old scars and callouses are gone, as are the crooked slant where she had broken her fingers. Frantically, she wrenches them apart, despising their unfamiliarity.  
Enough of this, she reprimands herself sternly, one clear thought in a swirling sea-storm of panic and confusion and what-ifs. She latches onto it desperately, presses her hands, still fluttering nervously as they seek out the comfort of a repetitive motion, flat against the cold floor and thinks it over and over again- enough, enough, enough- until the word has lost its meaning and she feels somewhat calmer again.

  
Her mind is still spinning in anxious circles, tying itself in knots the more she thinks. There’s only one surefire solution she knows of to ease the worried maelstrom; it’s time to remove herself from the equation, consider this from a more scientific standpoint. This doesn’t have to destroy her. Or maybe it does- after all, creation is a promise of violence, in and of itself born from destruction. Cells beget new cells by ripping themselves in two; the body is constantly sloughing off parts of itself which have outlived their usefulness. And this must still be true, even though so much is different, because stasis is death to the thousands of systems constantly at work to keep someone operating. Maybe there is some comfort there, then, that even though she cannot see it, at the smallest level, the familiar processes are continuing.  
She imagines she can hear them now, blood rushing from her heart to deliver oxygen to the rest of her body, cells splitting apart and bursting as they die only to be replaced instantly, even her DNA unwinding and reforming as it encodes new strands of her genetic information. How much of it changed along with her- which genes were snipped out of existence and remade in a different, ‘better’ image?

  
Damn. Not even two minutes later and she’s already cycled back to her horror at the transformation, visible and invisible- perhaps this won’t destroy her after all, she’ll just do it herself fixating on the sharp, shattered pieces of the dissonance between the self she recognizes and the one she sees reflected in the mirror.  
A worried voice cuts through the thick miasma of dismay choking her like poison- Elidor, knocking at the door and asking if she’s alright. Is she? No, she thinks, even as she calls out, “Yeah, just a minute,” and feels so much sudden relief to hear her voice, unchanged, that she nearly blacks out. Slowly, and with much aid from the IV pole, she pulls herself to her feet and chances another glance at the mirror. Immediately, she feels an overwhelming urge to punch it, to shatter the glass until her reflection is torn apart by the spiderwebbing shards, but she shoves it down forcefully, searches for resolve in the eyes looking back at her. She finds nothing there, but knows Elidor is waiting outside and opens the door, resigned.

  
“I was wondering where that pole had run off to,” he says with a teasing smile that falters the moment they make eye contact. Well, that was a short-lived act. “Kira, what’s wrong?”

  
Nothing that can be fixed, nothing that she doesn’t just have to get over and deal with. She starts to tell him as much, but her throat is so tight that her voice grates painfully as she speaks and she gives up halfway through the sentence, ending with a dismissive wave that falls too far flat of insouciant to be convincing.  
Elidor’s brow furrows in concern. “I’ll get the rest of the team, and-”

  
“No!” she cuts in, flinging a hand out to stop him. If there’s one thing she’s absolutely sure of, it’s that she cannot be around them right now, can’t let them see that she can’t handle this, can’t deal with their thoughts or feelings or opinions when her own are still such a confused mess. And she especially cannot see Nate, not when she knows what’s going to happen; of course, he is going to be perfectly kind, even as he tells her this can’t work, she’s too different now that she is divorced from her humanity, he had never intended for this relationship to last centuries. His gentleness will cut deeper than the words themselves, and if she were not feeling so distant from herself, she would do it herself, end it for him quickly and impersonally so she can spare them both the pain. But she is too unmoored right now, too frustratingly unsure of herself, to face a reality that has fundamentally shifted. “No, please, just- can you tell them I’m not awake yet? Or- just, anything?” Some small, unchanged part of her mind rebels violently at that, hates her for the cowardice, but it is too easily drowned out by the tumult of dazed doubts and worries shadowing her to be heard.

  
It takes about ten minutes of pleading for Elidor to uneasily agree to give her more time; eventually, he concedes, and leaves the room with a concerned glance over his shoulder. The door closes behind him, and she lets herself sink to the ground once more, curled over like she could belatedly shield herself from the injury which necessitated all this, until she drags herself back into the bed and seeks relief in unconsciousness.


End file.
